Is This How Democracy Ends?

“I used to think it would take a great financial crisis to get both parties to the table, but we just had one,” said G. William Hoagland, a former adviser to the Senate Republican leadership on fiscal policy.

“These days, I wonder if this country is even governable.”

Quoted in The New York Times’ lead story, “Party Gridlock Feeds New Fear of a Debt Crisis,” Hoagland nailed it.

America faces a crisis of democracy.

At its heart is a fiscal crisis. After the 2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion, we are running a 2010 deficit of $1.6 trillion. Trillion-dollar deficits are projected through the Obama years, be they four or eight.

Long before 2016, however, holders of U.S. public debt will stop buying Treasury bills or start demanding higher interest rates to cover the growing risk of a default.

This week, a smoke detector went off. China, in December, had unloaded $45 billion of its $790 billion in T-bills. Is Beijing is bailing out?

To assure the world we are not Greece writ large, the United States must soon adopt a visible plan for slashing the deficit.

There are three ways to do it. One is through growth that increases the tax revenue flowing into the Treasury and reduces the outflow for safety net programs like unemployment insurance.

But growth only comes slowly and can take us only so far.

Needed is a combination of big budget cuts and tax hikes. But the only place one can get budget cuts of the magnitude required is from the big entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And the only place to get revenue of that magnitude is by raising taxes on the American middle class.

And here is where Barack Obama hits the wall.

Republicans are not going to give him a single vote for a tax increase. Not only would this violate a commitment most made to the people who elected them, it would be politically suicidal. For behind the GOP today, and its best hope of recapturing Congress in 2010, are the Tea Party irregulars.

And Tea Partiers now play the role of Red Army commissars who sat at machine guns behind their own troops to shoot down any soldier who retreated or ran. Republicans who sign on to tax hikes cannot go home again.

Consider: Arlen Specter voted for the Obama stimulus and faced an immediate primary challenge from Pat Toomey, who took a 20-point lead, forcing Specter to quit the party to survive. Popular Gov. Charlie Crist embraced Obama on a Florida visit and got an immediate primary challenge from Marco Rubio, who now looks to be the next senator from Florida.

The Tea Party folks are not into the Gerald Ford politics of compromise and consensus. They have seen what it produces: the inexorable growth of Government.

Ex-Sen. Alan Simpson, a Republican and co-chair of Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, has challenged the patriotism of conservatives who plant their feet in concrete.

“There isn’t a single sitting member of Congress — not one — that doesn’t know exactly where we’re headed. … And to use the politics of fear and hate and division on each other — we’re at a point right now where it doesn’t make a damn whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, if you’ve forgotten you’re an American.”

Simpson is right in his assertion that anti-tax Republicans went along with George W. Bush’s spending spree — for two wars, prescription drug benefits under Medicare and No Child Left Behind.

Where he is mistaken is in suggesting “fear and hate” are behind the opposition to tax hikes. History, principle and honest politics explain much of that hostility.

Ronald Reagan, who consented to tax hikes in the 1982 TEFRA bill, told this writer he was swindled. Promised three dollars in spending cuts for each dollar in tax increases, he got the reverse.

George H.W. Bush won election by pledging: “Read my lips! No new taxes!” He broke his pledge, leaving many of the faithful with egg all over their faces. That may have cost him the presidency.

Principled conservatives are resisting tax hikes because they believe government has grown too huge for the good of the country. And if that means putting the beast on a starvation diet — no new tax revenue to batten on — so be it. Cold turkey time.

Anticipating gains in November, Republicans will not give Obama any new taxes before then. After November, their ranks swollen by Tea Party support, they will be even more intractable.

Where does that leave Obama — and us?

Later this year or early next, to avoid a debt crisis, Obama will ask Congress to raise taxes and pare back entitlement programs.

Republicans will fight the taxes to the last ditch. Democrats, having lost dozens of colleagues in the November massacre, will rebel against the cuts in social spending.

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26 Responses to Is This How Democracy Ends?

“[T]he only place one can get budget cuts of the magnitude required is from the big entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

Are you kidding me? How about ending the Empire, closing bases worldwide, bringing our troops home, ending foreign military aid, and slashing the “defense” budget by two-thirds or three-quarters, which would still leave us with the most powerful military in the world while eliminating the primary motivation others have to attack us.

“…the only place one can get budget cuts of the magnitude required is from the big entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

I am so tired of reading statements like this. Last week it was two stories in Newsweek with almost exactly the same wording. It’s as though the “defense” budget doesn’t even exist.

Mr. Buchanan, you write so eloquently elsewhere about the cost of empire; why this blind spot? Or did you mean that given political reality, hoping for cuts in “defense” spending is magical thinking. You’re right, but if that’s what you meant, please say so.

You know, I’ve posted diaries about the issue of governmental paralysis on DailyKos and gotten slammed by the ultralefties on that site. I could perhaps regurgitate one of those diaries here, but why bother? For all the lofty rhetoric being tossed about by the left and the right, the prognosis really boils down to three very simple words.

“Simpson is right in his assertion that anti-tax Republicans went along with George W. Bush’s spending spree — for two wars, prescription drug benefits under Medicare and No Child Left Behind. Where he is mistaken is in suggesting “fear and hate” are behind the opposition to tax hikes. History, principle and honest politics explain much of that hostility.”

The tax hikes and Social Security/Medicare cuts are nothing but temporary holding measures anyway, designed to allow Washington to continue to funnel the resources of the entire country and average taxpayers to insatiable leviathan, which will continues to need exponentially more to feed itself anyway. What we need are massive cuts to government expenditures and payrolls from the defense sector to the federal workforce to government unions at both the national and state levels, along with an end to the fascist war-profiteering complex, all of which soak up the lion’s share of the country’s public resources and give back next to nothing in return.

Status-quo fuddy-duddies like Simpson and the corrupt GOP establishment just don’t have what it’s going to take to save this country any more than do the Marxist and neoliberal Dems.

“[T]he only place one can get budget cuts of the magnitude required is from the big entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. How about dismantling the empire, closing our overseas bases, cutting the two-thirds to three-quarters (or more) of the “defense” budget that has nothing to do with defense and everything to do with hegemony, ending foreign military aid, bringing our troops home, and getting back to being a free republic that minds its own business?

Liberal democracies are notoriously unable to demand sacrifice from their citizens, outside of time of war. But political leaders, and the experts who advise them, should contemplate that countries that destroy their economies will cease to be liberal democracies.

“The problem now is that the U.S. budget deficits have suddenly grown immensely from wars, bankster bailouts, jobs stimulus programs, and lower tax revenues as a result of the serious recession. Budget deficits are now three times the size of the trade deficit. Thus, the surpluses of China, Japan, and OPEC are insufficient to take the newly issued U.S. government debt off the market.” Paul Craig Roberts

It’s not the economics of the politics or vice versa. There is present a genuine lack of will, nerve, and faith that has destroyed more nations than mere money questions, financial calculations, or even their consequences. How can Buchanan, the advocate of hard realism, be so naive?

But, of course, no one can even concieve of cutting rid of the Empire, and its costs. What is the real cost of our empire? Not just that part actually labelled “defense?” But all the “supplementals” to fight the wars, the part of the D of E that is really about building bombs, the Dept of Veterans Affairs, the foreign aid (military and otherwise), the “intelligence” agencies, the Dept of Homeland Security, and on and on and on. End the wars, and cut the rest of it to the bone, and you have already done more than made a good down payment on the debt.

To me, it seems the real choice is guns or butter. And, for some reason, guns are always “off the table.”

And US defense “committments” are always expanding. We are now at or close to the point where any country, anywhere, no matter how far from any of our real allies, or even the shipping lanes connecting them, must have a government of the USA’s choosing, or some form of war will follow. Landlocked “Stans” deep in Central Asia? Yep, the US can’t afford to “lose” them to China or Russia. Countries with no resources, no cultural affinities to the US and of no conceivable threat to the USA in Africa? Yep, them too. We now need an “Africa Command: to deal with them militarily, along with the other various”Commands” that divide the Earth up into units convenient for our military, with nothing, and nowhere, left out. Only Russia and China are beyond our control, and we devote plenty of resources bullying and threatening them as well.

How could any polity or economy, no matter how prosperous and hardworking, pay for such a Global Imperial and Military SuperState,and not go broke? Rather than raising taxes on our now beleagured middle class, or cutting back on our already less than generous “entitlement” programs, we should dismantle out horrible, oppressive and completely unnecessary Empire, bring all the boys and girls back home, and tend to our own garden. Now!

I’m not sure that what Buchanan wrote here either argues for or augers well for the demise of democracy, but one can perceive that our form of it at least is in serious trouble and might be bettered.

From what I have seen at least there’s only one significant political figure who is talking anywhere near soberly about all this and it is indeed Obama. Not nearly enough, but, still, sad but true.

For instance, every time I’ve seen any serious warnings lately about the “unsustainability” of our current deficit spending or etc. it’s been coming from him and not from either the Dems or the Repub’s in Congress.

And, likewise, except with at least some support from his own party, it again seems to be Obama who recognizes foreign over-reaching and is trying to stanch the bleeding by setting those date and time-limits for us in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Thus, as we have seen a number of times in the past, it can seem that the only political branch that has any real sense of responsibility is indeed the Executive, leading to the question of why we should have a Congress anyway?

Of course the Framers’ answer was that it would be a check on the Presidency, but can’t one reasonably ask what check has it ever really been, especially in modern times? Maybe in Watergate? And can’t one reasonably argue that its “checking” benefits can seem to have been far outweighed by the damage it has inflicted on us? Especially when it comes to spending?

Especially coming on the heels of George Bush’s tenure I know it sounds crazy and even frightening to contemplate a very much more powerful Executive. But at least it would seem to be the case that the more clearly you bestow a power on some office or branch the clearer too is the responsibility for its results, right? And you’d still have the ultimate check of a vote for a very much more powerful Executive too.

Indeed, even under Bush I don’t see how Congress provided much of a check upon him, and, like Obama, he could seem to have at least some concern about excessive spending. Yet who can say that they’ve *ever* perceived any real concern whatsoever on Congress’ part for *any* excessive spending?

I dunno, but maybe our problem is that in our (utterly understandable) zeal to diffuse power most if not all of what we’ve really done is abetted the disguising of irresponsibility. And in absolute terms, while we might have diffused power from residing too much in any *one* branch, what difference does it make if, with the connivance of Congress, our *entire* Government has still gathered such enormous power into its hands?

(That is, in being concerned about the rights of citizens, what were our Framers really after, their right merely to be free from … legislative tyranny, or Executive tyranny, or just governmental tyranny *in general*? Or to put it another way, what difference does it make to you if you are being tyrannized not by some legislature but instead by some Executive? Or vice-versa?)

Like I say I dunno, but the more I think of it the more it seems to me that in our modern times at least we’ve suffered much more from obscuring responsibility than we have from any excessive agglomerations of power. While that doesn’t mean I like that it may be the answer, may be nevertheless it is: Vest lots more power in just one branch and lash it down as you can with ultimate Constitutional restrictions and then of course periodic voting too.

Might beat being bled to death by a thousand cuts from ever-shifting groups of governmental players who one can never clearly identify and hold to account, which is what can seem to be what is happening now.

The national deadlock makes a good case for secessionism. Why not begin work now on a right to secession amendment. First principle: Only states can secede.
Second principle: States can only secede by two successive referenenda for secession within a three year period.
Third principle: Seceding states must present their citizenry with the opportunity to secede from the new nation.
Fourth principle: No seceding state could join with another seceding state in a federation or confederacy for a period of 30 years.
Fifth principle: No seceding state could provide any military bases to any nation other that the USA for a period of 50 years.
Sixth principle: Any territory within a seceding state that in turn seceded could only rejoin the USA as a territory and would not be eligible for statehood for a period of 20 years.

I completely agree with Ruddyturnstone – I’d be interested to see how much it costs us to have troops stationed in South Korea – China has enabled NK for too long – let’s let them clean up the mess and pull our troops back.

Also, how much do we spend to protect Japan? Germany?

I’d love to see a cost breakdown on that. Let’s cut farm subsidies – maybe this would be enough for the EU to grow some backbone and stand up to European farmers – it’s killing their economies as well.

I think through some well placed cuts and freezes on entitlements (let’s introduce means testing), we can balance our budget without additional taxes (we can also stop giving tax breaks to companies that outsource our jobs).

I wholeheartedly agree with Simpson – let’s make this an American issue. And this is coming from someone who has supported Obama – we can’t go on like this – if the left can’t wake up to this – Obama will have to do it by himself and start vetoing spending. Yes, it’s a long-shot, but he may as well go down swinging.

Even a liberal (of whatever flavor in today’s topsy-turvy nomenclature) should agree that large imbalances in a government’s balance sheet cannot go on forever. Small ones, not so clear, but there’s no doubt the deficits since 2003, Bush’s and Obama’s, are not sustainable.

But I’m surprised at the statement: “But the only place one can get budget cuts of the magnitude required is from the big entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

Just three points:

1. You don’t mention defense in all its manifestations. When defense spending is running over 20% of our total, and the United States spends more on military expenses than the _next 10 nation-states combined_ (!), cuts in military expenditures seem an obvious starting point.

2. That said, fiscal reform of our entitlement systems is also imperative. But quite a few serious economically informed people argue that Social Security is the smallest part of that problem. Yes, contribution limits need to rise, and benefits need to be adjusted, but incremental changes would be clearly adequate. (And yes: the trust fund, invested in Treasury securities, is an expense that will have to be redeemed with tax income.

3. Medicare, in contrast — or more generally, health-care spending — is wildly out of control and clearly demands a complete overhaul. The principles of insurance (social or private) and the experience of other nations suggests some kind of mandate/regulation (Switzerland, Netherlands, France) or single-payer (Canada, England) is the only way to manage incentives rationally. “Market” solutions for health-care finance (as opposed, in part, to health-care delivery) have a terrible record so far, what with cherry-picking, death-spirals, and the other well-known conundrums of cost- and risk-sharing systems. I’m disappointed by the Republican party’s choice to simply resist any plausible reform (including reforms that the party supported only a few years ago), and both the later Clinton and Bush administrations deserve black marks for their utter failure to address these issues…but where do we go from here.

4. Finally, as the original post correctly notes, tax hikes are the last part of any solution — large or small, as the case may be. As a good liberal, I want taxes to be as low as prudent, but also as high as needed to sustain a civil society. Simply raising tax rates without addressing the other issues — militarism, and health care finance — is not what I support. That said, it must be noted that the tax rate, overall, in the United States is fairly modest for a developed economy. Overtaxation (of any segment of the population or economy) is not wise, but there are relatively few segments of our economy that face overtaxation by any sensible standard.

The main point, though remains: unless some kind of ‘consensus for prudence’ emerges, none of the necessary reforms will be introduced through a deliberative process. The results will be reforms through economic forces — inflation, default, despression, deflation — all of which are enormously more painful and destructive than reform through deliberative process. And I can’t avoid concluding, like the original post, that the Republican party’s stance of absolute rejection of reform, coupled with a (probably utterly hypocritical) embrace of populism, is a major obstacle to the emergence of a consensus for prudence.

Some parts of our democratic structures clearly exacerbate the situation, by rewarding choices by the minority party that are electorally advantageous even though destructive for policy. Can we reform democracy enough to preserve the union?

“Conservatives” have been trying to end so-called “entitlements” since they were created. Ironically, with “capitalism” being what it is nowadays, entitlements are needed more than ever. The government is not allowed to bring its scale to compete in the market and is not allowed to actually MAKE money rather than TAKE money. Imagine if our government could invest in our stock markets or fund improvements in infrastructure through stock investments rather than blank check policies. But no one wants the U.S. government as a stock holder because then it might be a tad harder to hide corporate incompetence. For that matter, then we’d have to add government incompetence to corporate incompetence.

This entire issue could be eradicated if the U.S. government printed and loaned its own money rather than borrowing money from the Fed. Taxation wouldn’t even be necessary under those circumstances, the government would make its money from RECEIVING interest payments rather than going broke MAKING interest payments. Bottom line, the government doesn’t control its own money supply. Some folks believe that the real reason JFK was killed was because he wanted the U.S. to start printing its own money again. Maybe that’s just a crackpot theory but I do know that our system of successive debt is unsustainable.

the only place to get revenue of that magnitude is by raising taxes on the American middle class.

Or we could, y’know, quit throwing so much money at the Pentagon. We’ve already got more nuclear weapons that we will ever need, and every time we make a new one that’s one more that we’ve got to spend money maintaining. If we did that while simultaneously getting rid of the Bush tax cuts it’d be extremely helpful in getting us out of this mess.

Pat Buchanan knows very well what “Starve The Beast” is code for shifting the burden of government onto labor and off the backs of the investor class. And, Kudos to Pat because it seems to be working perfectly as IRS statistics show. Since 1995, the wealthiest 400 families in America have seen their incomes grow exponentially while 90 percent of us saw no income growth. In addition, for the first time in modern history, no new jobs were created during the entire first decade of the 21st century. In fact, more than $5 million Americans have no income whatsoever aside from food stamps. Those “beasts” are definitely starving. How far behind are the rest of us, I wonder?

Taking into account all taxes, state, local, medicare and federal income taxes, the lower the income the greater the percentage of the tax burden. As Montesquieu famously observed, democracy cannot withstand such injustice in tax policy. And Suprem Court Justice Brandeis warned that we cannot have both democracy and such wide income disparity. And yet, that is exactly where we are headed with the GOP preference for gridlock over governance.

As Paul Craig Roberts observed, Karl Marx probably understated the evils of unregulated, predatory capitalism. Unfortunately, he says, the demise of both captialism and democracy, which are the two “beasts” to which Grover Norquist referred and which are really being starved by the authoritarian followers of his demogoguery, appears imminent.

Having already given us the Southern Strategy, which brought Southern racists into the Republican party – a party to which now only a mere 21 percent of us self-identify – Pat Buchanan now enables the “Starve The Beast” strategy. And, judging by how close we have come to economic catastrophe, it appears that one has been as good for the country as the other.

Interesting responses here from progressive readers of @TAC. Here are a few of my thoughts (sorry for the length):

Firstly, anyone who has read more than a few PJB articles knows that he is as big a critic of American imperialism/militarism as any prominent commentator. The lack of mention in this column is an oversight in the piece, not in his thinking (unless it changed in the last week). All of you are right about the many unnecessary costs of our imperial folly.

Secondly, Obama is drawing near to the truth with his lips, but his actions belie cunning electoral politicking or (worse) a profound misunderstanding of money and human action. Rather than allow the cause and effect feedback of a real market to run its course, elected Federal government (with the help of the central banking system it created) is sustaining imbalances and malinvestment to protect itself from the pain (real and electoral) that actual market correction causes. Can government mitigate the pain by how it let’s go of this power? Hopefully.

TomB,
The real and final check on the Executive was intended to be the power of the people and the states to govern themselves in all matters for which the Federal government was not granted power by the Constitution. Furthermore, do you really want a Federal political class that consists of one man and the legions of functionaries that he commands, with no judges and no law writers, no matter how ineffective? Also, there is at least one other prominent politician who has been consistent in word AND deed with keeping government small and sustainable. Maybe you should check him out. He just won a straw poll.

PQuincy,
Just what “market” solutions are you referring to? I see a land of monopoly middlemen controlling territory and market share through regulatory preference.

JK,
The reason people don’t want the Federal government directly investing in private enterprise is the risk that it will use this as yet another tool to choose winners and losers in society based on political considerations. The negative economic forces you are witnessing are the evidence of inexorable natural forces that we have tried to tame with the best of intentions, but which (like all of nature) will have their way in the end. The longer we hold the waters back, the more powerful and destructive they become.

Printing money doesn’t create wealth. Just like the current central-banking system, it simply transfers wealth from the people holding currency to the people receiving freshly minted currency. The practical result is favored cronies and poorer everyone else. Why not try free banking?

It’s a bit presumptuous to suggest that the collapse of democracy in the United States would mean vis-a-vis the collapse of democracy worldwide – there are a few other democracies – but the point is well taken. I find particularly convincing David’s 3:00 PM comment regarding the percentage of the defense budget that is dedicated to hegemony rather than defense.

America is going to have to climb down somewhere. The present committment cannot be sustained. However, the individidual who has to inform America that there must be the smallest reduction in the speed of the American juggernaut, staggering ever onward, will get his ass handed to him by the voters.

Criticism of the “special interests” notwithstanding – and merited – the American population is one big collection of special interests. There are those who would revolt if the billions in foreign aid to Israel, a wealthy country that merely converts taxpayer cash into purchases of advanced American weaponry that it’s essentially getting for free while laundering money for the military-industrial complex, were shut off or even reduced. Eliminate the DHS? Oh, my, no, even though it didn’t exist before 9-11, has basically done little or nothing but politicize terror alerts since and has repeatedly dropped the ball (TSA screeners missing relatively obvious weapon hides in unannounced test runs), it’s “vital to national security”.

It’s probably not an insurmountable problem as long as GDP doesn’t fall off the edge, but you can’t sell austerity to an uninformed public that has the Republicans whispering in its ear that things can be just the same without sacrifice.

Yes, this is how democracy ends. However, the central crisis is no financial, it is political. We are facing a financial crisis, but it is ultimately a manageable one, and can be dealt with in any of several ways, as the essay and the commenters rightly note. However, we are not merely facing, but are currently enduring a political crisis that has rendered the legislative branch of the government incapable of dealing with the looming crises (fiscal, etc.) facing the republic. Intertwined with this, we are facing a crisis of confidence in the legislative branch. The one-word summation of these central, intertwined crises is: corruption. A longer explanation of what’s going on, which covers the most important points, can be found here:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100222/lessig

Most terrifying is the fact of our uncuttable defense budget. This points to the fact that the military is the one branch of government that is actually very well trusted by huge swathes of the population. Most everyone hates the Fed, most everyone hates Congress, half the country hates the Executive at any one time, the Supremes aren’t a very active force in the politics of the day, and when they are they have for the last couple of decades confined themselves to aiding and abetting the worst impulses of the other branches, but no one in any position of influence or power (who wants to stay that way) will criticize the military. The outcome of the crisis currently being precipitated by the tea party commissars is unfortunately predictable on that basis.

In response to my post wondering about whether the Congressional branch has been a net positive or negative Jack Tracey wrote:

“Furthermore, do you really want a Federal political class that consists of one man and the legions of functionaries that he commands, with no judges and no law writers….”

A.) I didn’t say no judges, Jack. Indeed in wondering about a world with a much diminished if not absent legislative branch I said that the Executive ought be tied down as much as possible via Constitutional measures in addition to voting, and of course to make Constitutional lashings relevant you’d have to still have a strong judiciary.

B.) As to the rest of your “Furthermore” point then, my question isn’t whether we *would* like “a Federal political class that consists of one man and the legions of functionaries that he commands.” Instead of course the question is whether that man or woman and their functionaries wouldn’t be more responsible and more easily held to account than the system we have now which is not only that one man or woman and their functionaries, but the 535 congress-creatures too and their functionaries and etc.

Think about it: One election race, each X # of years (3 seems about right, 4 or 5 acceptable), in which the the incumbent couldn’t escape responsibility by blaming the other party or blaming Congress. Nice and clean question: How did they do, and which of their opponents, if any, would have done better?

Granted, they’d have more power to get us into messes. But we haven’t avoided either foreign or domestic ones so great as it is right now, have we? Indeed, much of the problem right now is identifying who the hell to *blame* for same, no?

Of course every new Pres. under my suggested system could still blame the old Prez., or all of them, but that’s always been limited and would be even less persuasive in such a focused system: After all when candidates run they implicitly say they can fix the misdeeds of their predecessors, right?

Not that this is going anywhere, but I don’t think it’s a necessarily stupid idea. So much of the mess that I think we are going to be living in for a long time is going to be economic and that’s especially where I think responsibility has been so diffused that it’s simply impossible to identify those that are indeed responsible. And thus impossible to ever stop the irresponsibility.

Just sayin … worth a thought methinks. To me—and Mr. Bayh now, whose had to live in it up close and personal for a long time—Congress looks to me to be just an utter cesspool. Not a molecule of incentive for any of them to put the national interest first. None.

“Needed is a combination of big budget cuts and tax hikes. But the only place one can get budget cuts of the magnitude required is from the big entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And the only place to get revenue of that magnitude is by raising taxes on the American middle class.”

I can’t believe that a self-defined Conservative wrote this.

You are proposing that we as a country attack the parents of the capable wage earners and then attack the wage earners – exactly the opposite of what has been shown to alleviate deficits and improve our economic situation.

Specifically what will work is a reduction in the size of Leviathan internally and the Empire externally. This will allow us to reduce the tax burdens and grow the economy. State and local governments would do well to emulate this proposal as well.

“What we need are massive cuts to government expenditures and payrolls from the defense sector to the federal workforce to government unions at both the national and state levels, along with an end to the fascist war-profiteering complex, all of which soak up the lion’s share of the country’s public resources and give back next to nothing in return.”

Seems to me like Chris M writes correctly but is it possible as long as citizens are able to vote? So many people are employed in those areas that it seems to me politically too difficult. May need to have a VAT for openers. Redicing the deficit needs to be the priority. I recall hearing O’Reily state years ago that the oil from Iraq would pay for the war. Didn’t work out that way at least not yet?

I was redirected here via a link on another board that regularly engages in less-than-civil debate. I am pleasantly surprised with the level of discussion here, and specifically the lack of name-calling, flame-baiting, and such that is standard fare on most internet sites.

I may not agree with everything that’s been said, but I deeply appreciate the rational and intelligent way each poster is presenting his or her points. It’s a pleasure to see that intelligent, thoughtful, respectful debate hasn’t completely vanished from our political discourse.

I’ve always respected Pat and voted for him in 2000. In his heart he is a patriot and an American first, unlike many in our government.

That said, I disagree on his anti-tax mentality. Fiscal conservatism means balancing income with expenditures. Republicans are reckless and have never been able to do that, otherwise they would always have cut spending before cutting taxes. The reverse is fiscally irresponsible.

Our imperialistic policeman of the world policies are a big part of our problems. We could cut the “defense” budget by one half and it would still exceed the military budgets of the next 4 most powerful nations.

Social Security is not an entitlement as some claim. The SS Trust “entitlement” has been used to fund everything from wars to tax cuts. Many Americans with wealth have benefited from that trust but have never paid a dime into it as they have no earned income.

We must starve the beast, some here assume big government is inevitable and merely debate upon whom the “burden” should fall.

We must unburden ourselves as the Founders of America did.

Big government is destroying the standard of living for the non-elite by not only robbing us of our hard earned wealth but our freedom as well.

Remember, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,
revolt, starve the government, take your country back. If we fail we and our children will live in the totalitarian world described by Huxley and Orwell who begin to look like prophets. Have you stood back and looked at America recently? What do you see?